[1]. A year or two after this conversation, the Icarian society at Nauvoo miserably failed. It also failed in France.
CHAPTER XXVI.
BUSTS OF THE MARTYRS—THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD—MANUFACTURING COMPANY ORGANIZED—FAREWELL TO FRANCE—TO EUROPE—A BIGOTED CAPTAIN—VISIT TO WASHINGTON—MEETING AN OLD FRIEND—COLONEL KANE—ARRIVAL IN SALT LAKE—GREETINGS.
Elder Taylor took advantage of his visit to England and Europe, where skill in the fine arts was more perfect than in the United States, to get out the busts of his friends and fellow-martyrs, Joseph and Hyrum Smith. He evidently contemplated this work before leaving home, since he had with him in England casts taken from the faces of the martyrs immediately after their death. He also had with him the various drawings made of them during their lives, to assist the artist in his work. The modeller, Mr. Gahagan, was one of the first artists of England, in proof of which it is only necessary to say that he had taken the busts of the duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, Sir Robert Peel, the emperor of Russia and a number of the principal nobility and gentry of England. The work was done under the personal direction of Elder Taylor, and he was successful in obtaining for himself and future generations a correct outline of the heads and features of the two martys, and as perfect a likeness of them as it was possible to obtain so long after their death.
It was while he was on this French and German mission, too, that he wrote his admirable work "The Government of God,"[[1]] a book of some two hundred pages. The author defines the kingdom of God to be the government of God, on the earth, or in the heavens; and then in his first two chapters proceeds to place the magnificence, harmony, beauty and strength of the government of God, as seen throughout the universe, in contrast with the meanness, confusion and weakness of the government of men.
It is a bold picture he draws in each case; one displaying the intelligence, the light, the glory, the beneficence and power of God; the other the ignorance, the folly, the littleness and imbecility of man. The great evils, both national and individual which He depicts with such vividness, the author maintains are beyond the power of human agency to correct. "They are diseases," he remarks, "that have been generating for centuries; that have entered into the vitals of all institutions, religious and political, that have prostrated the powers and energies of all bodies politic, and left the world to groan under them, for they are evils that exist in church and state, at home and abroad; among Jew and Gentile, Christian, Pagan and Mahometan; king, prince, courtier and peasant; like the deadly simoon, they have paralyzed the energies, broken the spirits, damped the enterprise, corrupted the morals and crushed the hopes of the world. * * * No power on this side of heaven can correct this evil. It is a world that is degenerated, and it requires a God to put it right."
BUST OF JOSEPH SMITH
